The Espurna was traveling through ‘Jump Espace’ towards the next system on the list, the X’hrvanja system , a massive blue star with barely three planets around it.
He decided to record the video call to his assigned psychologist, attaching the Alkagoria report and some comments about the interaction with the historians.
The reason why explorers had to keep a personal psychologist is because all sentient species found traveling the galaxies could suffer from the same illness, the Call of the Void.
They say when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. But the abyss sometimes is not a deep hole in the ground but a black tapestry filled with thousands of millions of stars; and when they look back to you well, that’s when your mind might do silly stuff. The psychologists were there to detect and prevent that to happen.
So he did his part and checked that he was still sane, he added some comments about Ryoshi being more active during jump, as if the parasites came out then, and then some other personal notes and prepared the file for sending.
It would be nine more days in jump so he started to work; preparing the 3d printer to replace the lost drones, configuring the new ones to resist the luminosity and radiation of a blue star, setting up the route from what he had from the first drone, and of course making sure the system would update his favoritism shows the moment he plugged the beacon in.
Still that left him a lot of time to wander around, observe Ryoshi hunting the ship's parasites which increased during jump, basically do nothing during transit and then do maybe some clicks and back to doing nothing. He liked this life, it was not for everyone but he liked it.
And he would get the first to see things, like that weird asteroid belt that was really a ship cemetery, he wondered what else had the Universe in store for him.
With more days to go he continued with his daily routine. Breakfast, gym, shower, play or movie, interact with Ryoshi a bit and then he would spend every day an hour or so reading and watching documentaries about the places and races of the empire.
Forests of any and all colors, submerged and over-the-cloud cities, space stations of all kinds and in the most beautiful places. Rivers, mountains, canyons, lakes, there were some planets out there with some awe striking scenery.
There was one planet in the Grjn’bhrugh system, which was all of it a single plant that reached the lower atmosphere, the whole thing was an ‘entertaining center for adventurous types’ as the documentary would put it.
Another one, in the Sier’kna system, was an ocean planet with no landmass to be found, and the pictures of the underwater cities and attractions were incredible.
Another thing he did to kill some time was add what could only be seen as a path for Ryoshi made out of shelves. She could climb the ship’s internal walls but with the path she could just run and jump to catch those parasites, and it was an interesting thing to see happening whenever she just came running and jumped on a bug, as if she could feel them from the other side of the ship.
He was lying on the couch watching one of those documentaries when he heard the warning beep indicating five minutes to the end of the jump. He rose up and went to the bridge, Ryoshi’s presence behind him knowing what was about to happen.
He sat down on the bridge chair and Ryoshi jumped on his lap, waiting for the jump to end and that tingling sensation on their bellies followed by a couple seconds of dizziness.
The jump ended, the buzzing from the engine stopped, Ryoshi jumped out of him and the panels on the bridge came alive with information.
He launched the beacon and the drones and started mapping this new system. It seemed smaller than others but that was because of the massive blue star covering a grand part of it, it was massive.
“Friday, beacon status?” - he asked the ship
“Beacon already in place and connection established boss” - was the ship response
“Can you check if this one is the biggest star in the whole Empire? Because this thing is huge!” - he commented, looking at the 3d drawing on his screens
“Checking… I’m afraid it is only the 10th biggest.” - answered the ship
“Only 9 bigger than this one, imagine that. Anything important incoming?” - he asked
“I’m afraid we don’t have any news about the Alkagoria system, I can’t detect any article or news headers about it. There’s a video from your mother and there’s a specific request from the medical guild, they want anyone who goes close to a blue hyper-giant to do a series of scans.” - explained the ship
“Weird, I didn’t see anything when we left” - he said while looking into the request on his data-pad
“It came out while we were in transit. Should we recall the drones to do the relevant modifications?” - was the ship asking
“Not necessary, we’ve got enough material to prepare a few more. It's not as if we’re going to lose them all, right?” - he joked while walking to the 3d printer to prepare those new drones.
But the new ones took a while to prepare and print. For starters the special configuration didn’t exist until 5 days ago so it was a new and not-optimized design. And you could tell that no engineer had done that, it was clearly a modification made by someone of medical background, not elegant at all but functional.
He looked at the design and realized two things. He knew enough to see this could be made better, and he didn’t know enough to do the changes himself; most probably whoever first designed it was in his same position.
With the printer configured and enough material provided he decided to make a few calls, see if he could do that better, so he called the medical guild from the leisure room, when requested he punched the extension that was accompanying the notes for the modification, a stone-made cat - probably a Jui’kk he thought - looking bored appeared on the screen.
“Medical guild, this is K’rjuink, how can we be of assistance?” - answered the cat
A bit taken aback he answered “Hi, I’m calling regarding the specification CIR4906 for exploration drones, I’ve got a request” and sent the details of the system he was currently in.
The stone cat, K’rjuink, looked at the document on his screen and said a “Huh!” before standing up and disappearing from the screen.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“I guess I’ll wait here then” - he resigned himself.
A couple minutes later a form appeared on the screen, another drow-like form but more filled with muscles and a lower voice.
“Hi I’m the one who designed the thing, how can I help you?” - said the drow-like being
“Hi, I’m XEA-6889475861, explorer full grade. I’m just preparing a few drones with these specs to explore the X’hrvanja system and its big, massively huge, blue star, and was wondering… can I send the specs to a techie I know to see if they can be optimized? They look a bit rough, to be honest.” - he explained
“Oh, right, I’m XDR-9879612322, you can call me doctor Jhh’ynm. Sure they’re rough, I wasn’t expecting anyone to beep those specs so soon and thought I would have time to refine them.” - the drow-like being answered, then looked to another screen to his side - “The X’hrvanja... We knew it was big but what you’re sending is a bit more than we expected, I didn’t have it flagged for exploration either”
“In any case” - he said looking to the main screen again- “feel free to have them improved. I’ll send you the originals straight away to see if you can find someone to improve them, I’ll mark the important details but a techie will recognize them for sure.” - the doctor finished.
They said their goodbyes and he received those originals as promised.
Next would be the call to his ‘friend’ the techie. The one thing about humans being relatively new to the galactic sphere was that they would pack like hungry wolves with each other, and during his internship he did some favors to a certain crazy engineer, maybe it was his turn to ask how things were going so he made the call.
He wasn’t sure it would go in, only certain ships were allowed to receive calls in transit and the Exxavian was not one of them.
“Hello? Oh Jordi! You damn devil, what’s going on with your life? Missed me that much, eh?” - said a crazy old lady of unconfirmed age but somewhere between her 40s and her 80s, (Empire medicine in humans was still very much in development) dressed with a grey overall with the Exxavian logo over her heart, grey hair hidden under a cap.
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Ei Rosie, you know after so many months alone in the precious solitude that is my ship I thought, why not get some old Rosie complains about people being stupid? That’s sure to enlighten my day!” - he answered
“So tell me boy, what do you need” - she asked with a smile
“I’m in front of one of the biggest suns I’ve ever seen, a gigantic blue, and the medical guild had a request for some specific configurations on the drones.” - he informed - “I’ve checked them and got the feeling that it could be done much better but wouldn’t know where to start, can you have a look?” - he said while sending the original files.
He could see her face looking at the blueprint now, calculating, planning, then a snicker.
“Of course I can bloody well do that better, what he should have done was put a request to the engineer guild and any idiot you can find there would have done a better job!” - she exclaimed.
“You’re going to be there for a while, won’t you? Give me a couple days so we can do this properly, even registering it officially and stuff.” - she replied full of confidence.
The procedure was important to reflect everyone who worked with something and who did what, that way society could quantify each other's contribution.
He resolved to let his current drones do the initial exploration and launch a couple of the modified ones, he would hold the rest until Rosie delivered.
He had some time now so he watched his mom’s video. He was starting to worry because she looked really tired now and his father was again nowhere to be found in the video. Apart from that, it was your typical mom-who-hasn’t-seen-you-in-forever call. Are you having fun? Eating properly? How is Ryoshi? And stuff like that. He recorded a response, asking in turn if everything was ok there, and decided to keep working.
He looked at the 3d drawing of the system and realized there was a belt here too, but it looked like a normal one, made of metals and stone. He put the planned route to explore the system’s planets and started the in-system engine, with the beacon online Rosie would be able to contact him when she was finished.
So the Espurna started her exploration of the system, moving towards the nearest planet, in this case it was a frozen rock 8500 km in diameter in the edges of the system.
A couple of frozen rocks 2500 and 3200 km in diameter accompanied it as its moons, all the drones reported normal to high ratios of minerals and metals and a weak magnetic shield coming from the planet, everything was as expected.
He was on the couch of the leisure room just writing the planet report when a message came in, Rosie’s plans.
The message started apologizing for being a hard ass but she couldn’t help herself and had notified the medical and engineer guilds about the proper procedure to follow, a chance to admonish TWO of the biggest guilds was too rare to let it escape.
To the medical guild she explained again that when facing engineering problems they had to submit a request to the engineering guild, they would make them the plans for free and they even had some archivists from the historian guild there to help check the records and see if someone had asked something remotely related!
To the engineer guild she reminded them that they existed to help the public, they had an obligation to proactively wander around the other guilds offering to help/improve their engineering projects.
She thanked him for the opportunity and attached the registered blueprint, with a note indicating that any further relation between her and the medical guild should add a small token of contribution to himself, since he started the whole process.
“Friday, please compare the new blueprints with the old ones.” - he said out loud
“The new blueprints require only 2/3rds of the material and has increased bandwidth and battery life” - replied the ship
He was amazed, he knew Rosie was good but that was the real difference between a novice and an expert.
“Can you analyze the improvements? And, given enough blueprints, could you learn to do the improvements yourself?” - he asked the ship
“Sorry boss, let me remind you that we AIs have capped creativity and some other limits defined so even when we become sentient we won’t become a problem.” - the ship answered
“Right, I forgot about that. I guess we’ll be using the engineer guild.” - he said pensively
“I believe that’s the idea boss, to have all the guilds working together” - continued the ship
He checked if there was enough material to make the new drones with the reworked blueprint and realized that, despite needing less material, it needed more rare earth metals that the ship currently had.
A quick conversation between him and the ship put them both in transit to the belt in order to beam up some rocks and extract the necessary material. They located a few rocks with nice quantities so they would go there, beam them up and the ship’s mini and nano drones would do the extraction. Feed all that to the 3d printer and the job would continue.
The whole process would add a couple days or maybe more to the whole system exploration but that was the job.
So time slowly passed, with all the explorer drones now printed and doing their jobs and the ship currently moving towards the second planet, an orange colored gas giant. It looked tiny because of the massive blue star but it was almost as big as Jupiter, 130 thousand km in diameter.
Still, with a star being about 700 million of km in diameter on its back, this planet looked like a dead pixel in the sea of electric blue that was that star.
With almost 80% of the system explored and all the big bodies detected the ship had already calculated the Lagrange points. They had one on their way to that gas giant so he set up another beacon there and continued his way. That was normal procedure, massive stars would affect their communications so a second or third beacon was something they would install.
The third planet for him, first counting from the star out, was a hellish rock way too close to the star to do his close-by analysis. He configured a few drones to drop there and send data before they were reduced to atoms.
He was finishing his reports by the second beacon when a message beeped, text only.
“Please leave some explorer drones with the modification and send back encryption keys. There are more things we’d need to test out and, since you’re already there, it is going to save us some days. Signed, dr. Jhh’ynm”
He looked at the message and checked his remaining drones. Most of them had already been cleaned and dismantled but there were 5 or so of the modified ones that were still on route to the ship. He put the commands to release control and configured a new key on them, then replied to the good doctor message with the encryption key.
“Attached the encryption keys for the exploration drones on the X’hrvanja system. I left 5 more there, I still have a couple days here before I jump out so let me know if you want me to set up a 3d printer near the beacon as well. Signed, explorer Jordi”
Nothing came in during those two days so he sent the report and asked Friday to take them to the next system.